There's a interview with me in the local weekly Hour. It got right most of what I do for a living. So often with interviews I talk and talk and talk and the reporter ends up extracting the least pertinent statements. I'm glad that didn't happen this time. I even like the photo. I was supposed to send some source code to the photographer to put over my face, but I never got around to it. I can't see what they put over my face; can anyone make it out? tags: me press interview work hour wiki
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I posted to evan.prodromou.name
5 Floréal CCXVI
http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/5_Flor%C3%A9al_CCXVI
April 24 2008, 6:55am | Comments »
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I posted to evan.prodromou.name
3 Floréal CCXVI
http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/3_Flor%C3%A9al_CCXVI
I'm happy to point to the announcement that Wikitravel Press now has a guide to Paris. Paris has long been a targeted city for Wikitravel Press, and I'm really happy we were able to get this book out. Bonus: the Wikitravel Guide to Paris includes maps from OpenStreetMap, the Open Content geo database and mapping system. We've got some new software to overlay Wikitravel listings onto the maps, and it's working really well. Thanks to OSM, editor Mark Jaroski, and managing editor Jani Patokallio for getting this great book out... just in time for Paris spring! tags: wikitravel wikitravelpress paris guidebook opencontent openstreetmap Podcasts I asked a couple of days ago (Journal/30 Germinal CCXVI) about podcasts on the subject of Open Source and Open Content. I wanted to summarize a few that came in through comments on my blog: The iCommons Podcast, which (like many podcasts) seems to be running a little slow -- no updates in about a year. Still, an interesting project to be watching. (thanks Brianna) Wikipedia Weekly, the really great show by Andrew Lih and Liam Wyatt. I should have thought of WW before -- I was interviewed for the show last year! (thanks Padraic) Also worth noting is Not the Wikipedia Weekly, which is, uh, not the Wikipedia Weekly. I got this one from an episode of WW! LUG Radio, which I found from another podcast, LQ Radio. This has turned into a pretty decent list, but I'd love to see some more diverse discussion of Open Content and Open Source in general. Please, feel free to send more tips. tags: podcast linux opensource opencontent Vinismo For some reason Vinismo went over some tipping point with StumbleUpon this weekend, and we had a real flood of users from that bookmarking site. I can't say why that happens; I find SU to be a totally opaque Web site and service. In other news, Stevey likes our business cards. Me too! I think they look great. M-C Doyon, the Montreal graphic designer who laid out our Web site, also did our paper branding, and I think she did a great job. tags: vinismo stevey marieclaudedoyon cards Yay Firefox 3.0 I don't know when it happened, but Firefox 3.0 beta does non-ASCII characters in the address bar correctly. So, if you're reading this entry on my site with FF3, you'll see the é in "Floréal" rather than the URL-encoded "Floréal". I also like seeing Japanese Wikipedia pages in the address bar showing up correctly. Nice job, FF3 team. tags: firefox firefox3 utf8 url Planet software should preserve categories So, apparently there's once again rising problems with content drift on Planet Debian. Personally, I think this is a problem with a technical solution. All three main flavours of RSS support post categorization. Many, many kinds of feed software provide categories (see, for example, this feed). If the Planet software would preserve these categories and pass them through to the output RSS feeds, then people who really only want to read about Debian could filter the output feeds for category "debian". People who wanted to know about other parts of their fellow Debianistas' lives would just leave the feeds unfiltered. I'm not sure if the Planet software doesn't support categories in output at all, or if it's just an option that's turned off on Planet Debian. If nobody else wants to take a look, I can look into making this work. It seems like a pretty simple fix. tags: planet planetdebian rss categories
- Tags:
- opensource
- podcast
- wikitravel
- wikitravelpress
- paris
- guidebook
- opencontent
- openstreetmap
- linux
- vinismo
- stevey
- marieclaudedoyon
- cards
- firefox
- firefox3
- utf8
- url
- planet
- planetdebian
- rss
- categories
April 22 2008, 4:12pm | Comments »
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I posted to delicious.com
Justin.tv - Startup School - HackerTV - Live Streaming Video
http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97554/Startup_School
April 20 2008, 8:28am | Comments »
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I posted to evan.prodromou.name
30 Germinal CCXVI
http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/30_Germinal_CCXVI
So, I'm really getting into the podcasts lately. I got myself a personal music player (one of these) in winter, and I've been using it to listen to podcasts while I run. Earideas has been a huge help in finding new podcasts to listen to. I've kind of graduated from the best of earideas feed, which covers a wide variety of podcasts, and I'm trying to dig into things that really matter to me. Three things in particular, of course: wine, parenting, and Open Source/Open Content. I've found a good number of podcasts on the first two subjects, but only a few on the last. Right now I listen to: the infrequent and misnomered FLOSS weekly, which isn't the same without Chris DiBona. LinuxCast, featuring the mellifluous tones of Don Marti LQ Radio, from Linux Questions. So, what else is out there for Free, Libre, Open kinda people? Any podcast suggestions? tags: lazyweb podcast floss flossweekly linuxcast lqradio
April 19 2008, 8:15am | Comments »
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I posted to evan.prodromou.name
25 Germinal CCXVI
http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/25_Germinal_CCXVI
I got my FON router delivered to my house about 2-3 months ago, but I didn't realize what it was until I was cleaning up my office to leave for Buenos Aires. Glad to have a project, I set it up on my home network while I was waiting for the taxi to the airport. I've only really started playing with it since we got back. FON is an international effort, originally based in Spain, to share extra network capacity with roaming wireless users. You set up a router in your home (or wherever), and any other FON user can connect to the Internet through your network. Conversely, you can connect on any other FON network. There is a lot of grass-rootsiness to FON, but it's a commercial project, which turns some people off. I originally heard of FON at Wikimania 2007, where FON provided wireless routers for each attendee's room. It was a nice service, although the doubled-up ESSIDs were kind of confusing at the time. They make a lot more sense for home use. I was impressed by how many FON spots there are on the Montreal/Plateau (see http://maps.fon.com/ for details); about one ever 2-6 blocks in any direction. I think there's an opportunity here to see a higher concentration, though. I'd love to see coöperation between FON and, say, Île Sans Fil, possibly involving the Ville de Montréal. Apparently there are already FON cities in different parts of Europe, so it's not impossible. I think FON is an interested development for WiFi -- a hybrid between community-based initiatives and a commercial venture. I'm not sure if it will be successful, but I think it's a step in the right direction. tags: fon wifi wireless network
April 14 2008, 9:52am | Comments »
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I posted to delicious.com
The Openid avatar system | Openvatar
April 13 2008, 6:09pm | Comments »
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I posted to evan.prodromou.name
24 Germinal CCXVI
http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/24_Germinal_CCXVI
I'm pretty impressed with the new Geotag Icon Project. The well-known feed icon has become ubiquitous, and it makes sense to have a free-to-use icon for geographically-tagged information. I can see it being very useful for hcard and geo microformats, for example. tags: geotagicon geo microformats Relayed for your review without comment For all those who think Open Content guidebooks like Wikitravel are by definition less reliable than proprietary ones: "Travel writer tells newspaper he plagiarized, dealt drugs". "A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay. [...] He didn't travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because 'they didn't pay me enough. I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating.'" Cough, cough. tags: lonelyplanet travel guidebook plagiarism
April 12 2008, 10:14pm | Comments »
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I posted to evan.prodromou.name
23 Germinal CCXVI
http://evan.prodromou.name/Journal/23_Germinal_CCXVI
Jeez, I wasn't involved in the nomination process this year, so I completely missed the fact that Wikitravel is a nominee for the Webby Awards this year. I'm now a part of IADAS so there's a conflict-of-interest for me, but I'd recommend checking out the People's Voice Webby Voting. tags: wiki wikitravel webbyawards Sign your mail I find it a little mind-boggling how many people complain about problems of email identity, like spam, e-mail spoofing and phishing, yet don't do anything on their own side to encourage strong identity on email. Everybody should use digital signatures on their email as a matter of course. It is absurdly easy to set up a GnuPG key for your email address. It takes only a few minutes. And you can sign up for an S/MIME key, too -- about $20/year, and supported even more widely by email clients. And organizations should send out email with signatures, too. Welcome email, password updates, and the like should all be signed. Phishing gets a lot harder when consumers are used to digitally-signed mail. If we're really serious about email abuse, we need to take the extra step at the client level. tags: email pgp gnupg smime phishing spam
- Tags:
- wiki
- wikitravel
- webbyawards
- pgp
- gnupg
- smime
- phishing
- spam
April 12 2008, 8:15am | Comments »
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I posted to delicious.com
10 Online Storage APIs
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/11/26/10-online-storage-apis/
useful list of web storage apis.
April 11 2008, 3:30pm | Comments »